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California Research Center

The California Research Center (CRC), was founded in Silicon Valley in 1989 with a charter to create new technology opportunities for the worldwide Ricoh Group. In 1997 it became the core of the newly established Ricoh Innovations, Inc.

In a world populated with corporate research centers large and small, the remarkable thing about CRC is that each researcher has both the power and the responsibility to envision and plan their own professional destiny. We ask every researcher two questions:

What’s your technological dream?

What will you do next Monday to realize this dream?

Dreams, vision and imagination are the essence of research. Without a dream, it’s certain that nothing exciting or globally important will be done. But without a clear idea of what you’ll do next Monday, it’s almost certain that even the greatest dream will never become anything more than a dream. This common-sense approach to research has led to small project teams producing an on-going sequence of major results, many of them the “first-of” or “best-of” at the time the research was performed.

Sample Technologies
  1. The world’s fastest JPEG software implementation, and the world’s smallest JPEG ASIC implementation, which led directly to the first consumer digital camera. (J. D. Allen, S. Blonstein, "The Multiply-Free Chen Transform: A Rational Approach to JPEG," Picture Coding Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, September 1991. M. Boliek, "Real-Time Discrete Cosine Transform Chip Using Generalized Chen Transform Technology," Electronic Imaging International, Boston, MA, October 1991.)
  2. The world’s fastest lossless binary entropy codec. (M. Boliek, E. L. Schwartz, J. D. Allen, "Parallel Entropy Coding using Multiple Codecs," Data Compression Conference, Snowbird, Utah, March 1994.)
  3. Invention of the wavelet-based image compression technology that led directly to the ISO JPEG-2000 standard. (A. Zandi, J. Allen, E. Schwartz, M. Boliek "CREW: Compression with Reversible Embedded Wavelets," Data Compression Conference, Snowbird, Utah, March 1995. Information technology -- JPEG 2000 image coding system: Core coding system, ISO/IEC 15444-1:2004 | ITU-T Rec. T.800, www.iso.org , 23 September 2004.)
  4. Development of the first deployed software system that offers relevant advice to user without explicit request. (Hart, P. E., and J. Graham, "Query-Free Information Retrieval," IEEE Expert,Vol. 12 No. 5, (Sept./Oct. 1997), pp 32 – 37)
  5. Development and deployment of the first practical document-handling system that autonomously saves a digital copy of every document passed to it, and makes the saved documents searchable without using key words or file names. This concept of “unconscious capture” was subsequently designed into the hardware of Ricoh’s digital photocopiers (Hull, J. J. and P. E. Hart, "The Infinite Memory Multifunction Machine (IM3)," Proc.  Third Int. Workshop on Document Analysis Systems," Nagano, Japan, Nov. 4-6, 1998, pp 49-58. Hull, J.J. and P.E. Hart, “Toward Zero-Effort Personal Document Management,” IEEE Computer, March 2001, pp. 30-35.)
  6. Invention of the first system for printing multimedia streams and navigation tools on plain paper, from the paper representation to any point in the stream. (Graham and J. J. Hull, “A Paper-based Interface for Video Browsing and Retrieval,” IEEE Int. Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Baltimore, MD, July 6-9, 2003.)
  7. Development of the first technique that automatically converts static documents into multimedia summaries that are easily viewed on small cell phone displays. (B. Erol, K. Berkner, S. Joshi. and J. J. Hull, “Computing a Multimedia Representation for Documents Given Time and Display Constraints,” IEEE Int. Conf. on Multimedia and Expo (ICME), Toronto, Canada, July 9-12, 2006, pp. 2133-2136. Winner of the Conference Best Paper Award.)

You can get a glimpse of our current dreams by visiting the group pages on this site.